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Jun. 7th, 2004 08:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yesthattomhttp://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/arts/06RICH.html
NY Times theater critic goes on anti-Bush rant in the Arts and Leisure Section. The best part is that it is truly the best report of the anti-gay'ness of the Republican party, how hipocritical it is, and how the anti-gay strategy isn't working for them.
FRANK RICH
Mr. Bush Won't Be at the Tonys
Published: June 6, 2004
It's now official. George W. Bush is not a theater queen.
The word came on May 22, after the president had taken his mountain biking fall on his ranch in Crawford. "You know this president," said Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, taking pains to explain that his boss had been on a 17-mile marathon, not some limp-kneed girly jaunt. "He likes to go all-out. Suffice it to say he wasn't whistling show tunes."
Let's face it; there had been some nervousness about Mr. Bush's butch bonafides. The president was on record as having loved "Cats." His uncle, Jonathan Bush, a New York song-and-dance man in the 1950's, had appeared as Will Parker in a revival of "Oklahoma!" ("A first-grade hayseed!" raved a critic at The New York Times.) Then there was that lingering question about why a president who had avoided Vietnam was dressing up in Tom Cruise pilot drag and, in Wesley Clark's phrase, "prancing on the deck of an aircraft carrier" in our current war. The scene looked more like a slab of choreography from the World War II movie musical "Anchors Aweigh" than "The Longest Day."
Had Mr. Duffy not intervened, some voters might have feared that the president would be tuning in America's gayest awards show, the Tonys, on CBS tonight. In an election year whose signature culture war has been fought over same-sex marriage, Mr. Bush and his party have made a fetish of distancing themselves from all things gay.
Only weeks before Mr. Bush was cleared of any non-Nascar tendencies, Lynne Cheney's lawyer halted a planned reissue of her 1981 novel, "Sisters," whose themes include Sapphic love in the Wild West. (Sample passage: "The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage — no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were.") Mrs. Cheney's husband has gone her one better. He's reversed the position he took in 2000 and embraced a constitutional marriage amendment, thereby disowning his gay daughter's civil rights more definitively than his wife has disowned her novel.
Next thing you know the Bush 41 v.p., Dan Quayle, may be suited up again to bitch-slap Carson Kressley as he did Murphy Brown. Yet you have to wonder whether the Republicans' gay-aversion therapy this year, once thought of as a slam-dunk political strategy, will prove so smart in the end. Much of the rest of the country seems to be inching, if not stampeding, in the opposite direction.
It was only three weeks ago that the world as we know it, or at least the institution of marriage, was supposed to be thrown into chaos when Massachusetts started marrying gay couples. That night "Nightline" replayed video of the celebratory spouses, implying that such kissy pictures might jolt public opinion like the photos from Abu Ghraib. "When Americans see images like these, will they be repulsed?" was the portentous question asked by a correspondent at Boston's City Hall. "Or will they see two people in love?"
But Massachusetts's wedding day proved to be the show dog that didn't bark. Americans merely shrugged, confirming polls both before and after that fateful day: voters rate same-sex marriage dead last in importance among issues in an election year dominated by a runaway real war. The only rabble-rouser "Nightline" could recruit to vilify same-sex marriage was Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. Never mind that he bears the same name as one of Hollywood's most famous closeted stars. Hardly had he started speaking than he invoked America's most famous gay playwright by calling John Kerry, whose opposition to same-sex marriage he found insufficient, "a cat on a hot tin roof."
Mr. Perkins's unconscious (one assumes) channeling of Tennessee Williams is an indication of the right's problem this year: no matter how hard it tries to set itself in opposition to what it calls the "homosexual agenda," it cannot escape the reality that gay people have been stirred into the melting pot of America and its culture, not to be expelled again. Only the Republican leadership fails to realize this. Otherwise why would it have chosen to renominate Mr. Bush in New York?
The attempts to square the convention's locale with the party (and the president's) support of a Constitutional amendment discriminating against gays has already produced a hearty share of "Birdcage"-level farce, with the promise of plenty more to come. The fun began when the House's most macho Republican, Tom DeLay, a k a "The Hammer," announced his plan to literally isolate some 2,000 delegates, congressmen and lobbyists from the multicultural-and-sexual viruses of Manhattan by housing them on a cruise ship that would serve as both hotel and "entertainment center" for the entire week. After much local criticism, he dropped the plan, only to learn that he had revealed his latent homosexual taste. The luxury liner he had chosen, the Norwegian Dawn, turned out to be a celebrated venue for floating same-sex bacchanals, including one being marketed by Rosie O'Donnell and her partner's travel company as "the very first gay and lesbian family cruise."
Once the floating entertainment center was scrapped, the dream of All Kathie Lee All the Time was dead. The Republicans then had no choice but to book the landlocked delegates into Broadway musicals. The eight shows selected (with tickets to be underwritten by The Times, as it happens) have one thing in common: none of them has an openly gay character. The host committee has said that the list was dictated by factors unrelated to the musicals' content. If you buy that, you'll believe that David Gest will be the next secretary of defense. Even with Ms. O'Donnell's Boy George musical, "Taboo," out of commission, it remains as hard to shun gay culture on Broadway as Mormons in Salt Lake City. To do so means skipping two recent Tony winners, "The Producers" and "Hairspray," and most of this year's Tony nominees. (The only harder feat would be to avoid Jews; the Republicans have booked "Fiddler on the Roof," to which they are sending the Florida delegation, yet). The Republicans were so desperate to escape Roger DeBris, the cross-dressing buffoon concocted by Mel Brooks, that they have gone and picked two shows ("Beauty and the Beast" and "Phantom of the Opera") set in France!
Another musical they're skipping, "Avenue Q," has a gay character named Rod, a Republican investment banker who tries to pass as straight by singing of a fictive girlfriend who lives in Canada. Apparently even entertainment this light — the show stars "Sesame Street"-style puppets — hits too close to home. The political right has always been a haven for closeted gay-bashers, from Roy Cohn to J. Edgar Hoover to Arthur Finkelstein (the guru who ran Jesse Helms's homophobic senatorial campaigns). This year, the sons of two of the most prominent front men for the Republican stand against gay marriage have come out for gay civil rights in the run-up to the convention. David Knight married his partner in San Francisco, defying California's successful 2000 Defense of Marriage ballot initiative, whose author and most obsessive supporter had been his father, the state legislator William (Pete) Knight. He was joined in parental defiance by Jamiel Terry, an adopted son of Randall Terry, the one-time antiabortion zealot who took on antihomosexuality as his new cause after his own church disowned him for getting divorced. Jamiel Terry, who had worked as an intern for a Pat Robertson propaganda factory as a teenager, told The Washington Post that he got up to speed on his budding homosexuality by reading the collection of gay literature his father kept at home for research purposes.
The good news for those on the right appalled by such apostates is that a spokesman for Scores, the straight Manhattan lap-dance club, has taken to bragging to The New York Post of the advance bookings lined up by convention delegates. But it's inevitable that some tabloid will uncover some swing-state delegates at a gay sex club as well. Not that there's anything wrong with that. The only people in New York likely to be dissing the many gay Republicans who turn up here are their own party leaders.
But even some of them have started to flip-flop. They can read polls showing that support for legal recognition of gay unions is rising (by 10 points between February and May alone, from 32 to 42 percent, according to Gallup) and that voters crucial to Mr. Bush's re-election (independents, Midwesterners and professionals) are turned off by the crusade (according to The Wall Street Journal-NBC News). This explains why The Weekly Standard, which in March confidently predicted that Mr. Bush could turn a close election into a blowout by demonizing same-sex marriage, was by May reduced to begging the White House to take up this "missing issue." It's not just the White House that's shying away from it. Republican leaders in both the House and the Senate have failed to bring the constitutional amendment to a vote. The conservative commentator Max Boot, formerly an editor at The Wall Street Journal editorial page, has said that the right has "already all but lost the battle" over the issue, with even the Rev. Lou Sheldon, the indefatigable gay-basher at the Traditional Values Coalition, telling The Times that he doesn't "see any traction" and has no idea why.
Mr. Sheldon might start looking at the culture. In recent weeks, the political retreat from gay-baiting has been joined by the prime-time schedule of the unofficial Republican TV network, Fox, as well. This spring it canceled in mid-run a flop reality show called "Playing It Straight," the premise of which was to cast gay men as villains by having them pretend to be heterosexual for the purpose of humiliating women. Undaunted, the network announced a two-hour reality special, "Seriously, Dude, I'm Gay," that was to have its premiere tomorrow night. According to Fox's initial press release, it called for straight men to move into West Hollywood lofts with gay roommates to experience "a heterosexual male's worst nightmare" by being schooled in the "gay lifestyle" — after which they'd be judged on the experiment's success by a "jury of their queers." After an uproar, the network re-edited the press release and, 10 days before broadcast, killed the show.
Fox's news division stubbornly stays on the case, but its last-ditch argument seems to be that same-sex marriage is a slippery slope leading to legalized polygamy. "I want to marry a guy and a babe!" exclaimed Bill O'Reilly while trying out one such scary what-if hypothesis for his viewers last month. Someone should tell the Republican conventioneers that if you throw Hugh Jackman and a pair of maracas into that same plot, you've got "The Boy From Oz."
NY Times theater critic goes on anti-Bush rant in the Arts and Leisure Section. The best part is that it is truly the best report of the anti-gay'ness of the Republican party, how hipocritical it is, and how the anti-gay strategy isn't working for them.
FRANK RICH
Mr. Bush Won't Be at the Tonys
Published: June 6, 2004
It's now official. George W. Bush is not a theater queen.
The word came on May 22, after the president had taken his mountain biking fall on his ranch in Crawford. "You know this president," said Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, taking pains to explain that his boss had been on a 17-mile marathon, not some limp-kneed girly jaunt. "He likes to go all-out. Suffice it to say he wasn't whistling show tunes."
Let's face it; there had been some nervousness about Mr. Bush's butch bonafides. The president was on record as having loved "Cats." His uncle, Jonathan Bush, a New York song-and-dance man in the 1950's, had appeared as Will Parker in a revival of "Oklahoma!" ("A first-grade hayseed!" raved a critic at The New York Times.) Then there was that lingering question about why a president who had avoided Vietnam was dressing up in Tom Cruise pilot drag and, in Wesley Clark's phrase, "prancing on the deck of an aircraft carrier" in our current war. The scene looked more like a slab of choreography from the World War II movie musical "Anchors Aweigh" than "The Longest Day."
Had Mr. Duffy not intervened, some voters might have feared that the president would be tuning in America's gayest awards show, the Tonys, on CBS tonight. In an election year whose signature culture war has been fought over same-sex marriage, Mr. Bush and his party have made a fetish of distancing themselves from all things gay.
Only weeks before Mr. Bush was cleared of any non-Nascar tendencies, Lynne Cheney's lawyer halted a planned reissue of her 1981 novel, "Sisters," whose themes include Sapphic love in the Wild West. (Sample passage: "The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage — no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were.") Mrs. Cheney's husband has gone her one better. He's reversed the position he took in 2000 and embraced a constitutional marriage amendment, thereby disowning his gay daughter's civil rights more definitively than his wife has disowned her novel.
Next thing you know the Bush 41 v.p., Dan Quayle, may be suited up again to bitch-slap Carson Kressley as he did Murphy Brown. Yet you have to wonder whether the Republicans' gay-aversion therapy this year, once thought of as a slam-dunk political strategy, will prove so smart in the end. Much of the rest of the country seems to be inching, if not stampeding, in the opposite direction.
It was only three weeks ago that the world as we know it, or at least the institution of marriage, was supposed to be thrown into chaos when Massachusetts started marrying gay couples. That night "Nightline" replayed video of the celebratory spouses, implying that such kissy pictures might jolt public opinion like the photos from Abu Ghraib. "When Americans see images like these, will they be repulsed?" was the portentous question asked by a correspondent at Boston's City Hall. "Or will they see two people in love?"
But Massachusetts's wedding day proved to be the show dog that didn't bark. Americans merely shrugged, confirming polls both before and after that fateful day: voters rate same-sex marriage dead last in importance among issues in an election year dominated by a runaway real war. The only rabble-rouser "Nightline" could recruit to vilify same-sex marriage was Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. Never mind that he bears the same name as one of Hollywood's most famous closeted stars. Hardly had he started speaking than he invoked America's most famous gay playwright by calling John Kerry, whose opposition to same-sex marriage he found insufficient, "a cat on a hot tin roof."
Mr. Perkins's unconscious (one assumes) channeling of Tennessee Williams is an indication of the right's problem this year: no matter how hard it tries to set itself in opposition to what it calls the "homosexual agenda," it cannot escape the reality that gay people have been stirred into the melting pot of America and its culture, not to be expelled again. Only the Republican leadership fails to realize this. Otherwise why would it have chosen to renominate Mr. Bush in New York?
The attempts to square the convention's locale with the party (and the president's) support of a Constitutional amendment discriminating against gays has already produced a hearty share of "Birdcage"-level farce, with the promise of plenty more to come. The fun began when the House's most macho Republican, Tom DeLay, a k a "The Hammer," announced his plan to literally isolate some 2,000 delegates, congressmen and lobbyists from the multicultural-and-sexual viruses of Manhattan by housing them on a cruise ship that would serve as both hotel and "entertainment center" for the entire week. After much local criticism, he dropped the plan, only to learn that he had revealed his latent homosexual taste. The luxury liner he had chosen, the Norwegian Dawn, turned out to be a celebrated venue for floating same-sex bacchanals, including one being marketed by Rosie O'Donnell and her partner's travel company as "the very first gay and lesbian family cruise."
Once the floating entertainment center was scrapped, the dream of All Kathie Lee All the Time was dead. The Republicans then had no choice but to book the landlocked delegates into Broadway musicals. The eight shows selected (with tickets to be underwritten by The Times, as it happens) have one thing in common: none of them has an openly gay character. The host committee has said that the list was dictated by factors unrelated to the musicals' content. If you buy that, you'll believe that David Gest will be the next secretary of defense. Even with Ms. O'Donnell's Boy George musical, "Taboo," out of commission, it remains as hard to shun gay culture on Broadway as Mormons in Salt Lake City. To do so means skipping two recent Tony winners, "The Producers" and "Hairspray," and most of this year's Tony nominees. (The only harder feat would be to avoid Jews; the Republicans have booked "Fiddler on the Roof," to which they are sending the Florida delegation, yet). The Republicans were so desperate to escape Roger DeBris, the cross-dressing buffoon concocted by Mel Brooks, that they have gone and picked two shows ("Beauty and the Beast" and "Phantom of the Opera") set in France!
Another musical they're skipping, "Avenue Q," has a gay character named Rod, a Republican investment banker who tries to pass as straight by singing of a fictive girlfriend who lives in Canada. Apparently even entertainment this light — the show stars "Sesame Street"-style puppets — hits too close to home. The political right has always been a haven for closeted gay-bashers, from Roy Cohn to J. Edgar Hoover to Arthur Finkelstein (the guru who ran Jesse Helms's homophobic senatorial campaigns). This year, the sons of two of the most prominent front men for the Republican stand against gay marriage have come out for gay civil rights in the run-up to the convention. David Knight married his partner in San Francisco, defying California's successful 2000 Defense of Marriage ballot initiative, whose author and most obsessive supporter had been his father, the state legislator William (Pete) Knight. He was joined in parental defiance by Jamiel Terry, an adopted son of Randall Terry, the one-time antiabortion zealot who took on antihomosexuality as his new cause after his own church disowned him for getting divorced. Jamiel Terry, who had worked as an intern for a Pat Robertson propaganda factory as a teenager, told The Washington Post that he got up to speed on his budding homosexuality by reading the collection of gay literature his father kept at home for research purposes.
The good news for those on the right appalled by such apostates is that a spokesman for Scores, the straight Manhattan lap-dance club, has taken to bragging to The New York Post of the advance bookings lined up by convention delegates. But it's inevitable that some tabloid will uncover some swing-state delegates at a gay sex club as well. Not that there's anything wrong with that. The only people in New York likely to be dissing the many gay Republicans who turn up here are their own party leaders.
But even some of them have started to flip-flop. They can read polls showing that support for legal recognition of gay unions is rising (by 10 points between February and May alone, from 32 to 42 percent, according to Gallup) and that voters crucial to Mr. Bush's re-election (independents, Midwesterners and professionals) are turned off by the crusade (according to The Wall Street Journal-NBC News). This explains why The Weekly Standard, which in March confidently predicted that Mr. Bush could turn a close election into a blowout by demonizing same-sex marriage, was by May reduced to begging the White House to take up this "missing issue." It's not just the White House that's shying away from it. Republican leaders in both the House and the Senate have failed to bring the constitutional amendment to a vote. The conservative commentator Max Boot, formerly an editor at The Wall Street Journal editorial page, has said that the right has "already all but lost the battle" over the issue, with even the Rev. Lou Sheldon, the indefatigable gay-basher at the Traditional Values Coalition, telling The Times that he doesn't "see any traction" and has no idea why.
Mr. Sheldon might start looking at the culture. In recent weeks, the political retreat from gay-baiting has been joined by the prime-time schedule of the unofficial Republican TV network, Fox, as well. This spring it canceled in mid-run a flop reality show called "Playing It Straight," the premise of which was to cast gay men as villains by having them pretend to be heterosexual for the purpose of humiliating women. Undaunted, the network announced a two-hour reality special, "Seriously, Dude, I'm Gay," that was to have its premiere tomorrow night. According to Fox's initial press release, it called for straight men to move into West Hollywood lofts with gay roommates to experience "a heterosexual male's worst nightmare" by being schooled in the "gay lifestyle" — after which they'd be judged on the experiment's success by a "jury of their queers." After an uproar, the network re-edited the press release and, 10 days before broadcast, killed the show.
Fox's news division stubbornly stays on the case, but its last-ditch argument seems to be that same-sex marriage is a slippery slope leading to legalized polygamy. "I want to marry a guy and a babe!" exclaimed Bill O'Reilly while trying out one such scary what-if hypothesis for his viewers last month. Someone should tell the Republican conventioneers that if you throw Hugh Jackman and a pair of maracas into that same plot, you've got "The Boy From Oz."
no subject
Date: 2004-06-07 07:23 am (UTC)Who doesn't? :)
For me, one of the two most memorable sections of And the Band Played On is the bit on the gay Republicans happily raising money for Reagan while they died of Aids and he didn't care.
delightfully snarky
Date: 2004-06-07 08:21 am (UTC)